If you're in the field of emergency management or emergency response long enough and you'd probably be able to guess that it literally means Business Continuity Management versus Emergency Management. Nothing anymore complicated as that.

Have you ever come across situations where folks in our field (or maybe not) have been using these terms loosely? Having said that and is there actually a difference between these two?

For starters, we all know that Emergency Management typically resides in the field of fast action emergency response to a given hazard or crisis, and involves response plans and standard operating procedures for situations involving fires, floods, road traffic accidents, rescue operations and so ON (you get the idea). It is generally a subset or a niche in the management field pertaining to managing emergency response situations. Those in the EMT and fire and police organisations would be well aware of this definition and the exercises that come packaged with it.

Business Continuity Management ON the other hand and has its roots starting from the commercial and banking industries, and typically involves an overall organisation-wide business continuity plan and requires various internal stakeholders as well as its associated vendors to provide a detailed response plan to support the organisation's critical business objectives (usually decided by senior management in advance). It conceptualizes that main objectives to be fulfilled by the organisation in times of identified crises such that its minimum service delivery standards will not be overly compromised.

In a nutshell and that's what these two fields of niche management are about. And if you're in the field of business continuity and you'll be well aware that emergency management or response will form part of your business continuity plan.